Re: Does someone knows what is this about?

[IDG New Media Support - Andr� Paulsberg]

> Forget about ORBS. Anyone using/caring about ORBS should reconsider his decision:

Before giving "judgement" over ORBS, please understand what they are doing
and the possible effects (both good and bad) for "you" as a mail admin.


> - ORBS blocks "unfriendly" sites criticising ORBS

You should read the ORBS site more carefully,
when it comes their listing policies.
You should also take care when stating that "ORBS blocks" this and that,
since ORBS only lists servers which come under their criteria.

The reason most discussed are their policy to list servers where admins
ask or demand ORBS to not test anymore, this causes ORBS to list
these IP addresse as something like "admin refused to be tested by ORBS".

What a mail admin chooses to do with is ORBS information is up to him,
and he may ignore some or all listings ORBS give out for "admin refused".


> - ORBS does not notify blocked sites about the blockage

This is not my personal experience nor their written rule,
as they send E-Mail to either postmaster @ RDNS or IP.
Where you have this information from is beyond me,
but if you know of any ORBS listed server(s) that hasn't
received any notification please tell us.


> - ORBS has IMHO too much false positives

I've yet to see a single false positive,
not that this means they don't exist.
I have however seen some of their nameservers being "outdated",
causing recently secured server to show up as Open Relays.



The ongoing "discussion" about ORBS attitude or Alan's personality,
doesn't seem to come from people who know what ORBS is or does.
Still they rant about ORBS and it's errors and lack of Internet ethics,
while failing to give any facts or prove any of their statements.

My personal opinion is that Open Relay server is the number one mail-problem
on the Internet today, some might say SPAM is but SPAMMERS aren't causing
a fraction of the possible havoc Open Relay servers COULD create.
If you don't believe me it's quite simple math to solve the possibility riddle,
just imagine someone wanting to "knock out" AOL's mailsevers for a few weeks...


There is about 100'000 Open Relay outputs, getting mail from 150'000 Open Relay inputs:
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
If anyone sent 1 E-Mail containing 1'000'000 random addresses in the "To:" field
and repeating this with all of the 150'000 inputs as their SMTP relay server,
it would generate 150'000'000'000 E-Mails sized 9MB - 16MB with sender "?@aol.com"
that would BOUNCE to and from the AOL servers and various Open Relay outputs.
Total havoc of upto 3'000'000'000'000'000'000 bytes sent to/from AOL servers and 
network,
but "only" took you 1'500'000'000'000 bytes to send (or 135 days at 1Mbps :-)


Regards Andr� Paulsberg